At Rs 60 crore, Nashik Inc goes the solar way

In an encouraging trend, more and more industries in Nashik are seen taking to solar power to meet their energy needs — In the past 12-18 months, solar power installation projects with 10MW capacity have been set up at the cost of around Rs 60 crore.There is potential of another 150 MW capacity installations worth Rs 900 crore in the next five years. The projects will also create around 1,500 jobs in Nashik, according to experts from solar industries.

The current solar power installation in the state is 379 MW and may go up to 15,000 MW by 2021-22, which will fetch investment worth Rs 90,000 crore and will create 1.50 lakh jobs, claimed solar experts from industries during a conference organized by the Nashik Engineering Cluster (NEC) on Thursday at its Nashik facility in Ambad the MIDC areas.G Sabde, chairman and managing director, Relyon Solar Pvt Ltd, said, “There is huge scope of solar power generation in the next five years. The country’s solar power installations, which were only 8 MW in 2009, have increased to 5,129 MW at present. The power requirement of the country is 2 lakh MW and the country will meet half of the total requirement (1 lakh MW) through solar power by 2021-22,” adding that batteries and other equipment required for solar power installations were currently being imported and thus there was huge scope in manufacturing solar power equipment.